May 03, 2020

Another short thread as I try to write a much longer one. Most of us realize that things are going to be different and this is your thread devoted to telling us what will be different and how different it will be. Two articles that might give a nudge:

May 02, 2020

A while back I posted a video of a studio performance of Paul Simon's "The Afterlife", and made some comments about how the different players were all articulating the time feel of the piece in different ways. I followed up on that in longer form with a couple of folks, and it was suggested that I post the longer version, if nothing else than as a break from epidemics and the SFJ.

So, a post about the art of playing time.

The critical skill in all aspects of music is listening. Not just listening, but hearing. Playing in tune, playing in time, blending in an ensemble, playing convincingly as a solo player - they all depend on hearing what is going on. And, in particular, hearing what you are playing. That's often the hardest, because you have an idea in your head of what it is you intend to play, and you assume that that is what is coming out of your voice or instrument.

Quite often, it's not.

So you have to train yourself to hear what it is that you are actually doing.

For time playing, there are two aspects of this. You have to learn to hear the time - the consistent forward march of beat after beat - independently of what you are actually playing. Because your playing may not be that accurate. And, you have to hear whether, and how, what you are playing lines up with that - initially, just to be accurate, but also because, at some point, when you advance beyond beginner and play with players who hear stuff like this, you want to be able to deliberately play ahead of the time, or behind the time, exactly on the time, or any combination thereof.

Humans have a natural ability to sense the passage of time, some more accurately than others. But for almost everyone, it's something that can, and probably must, be fine-tuned through practice.

So - what is the practice that leads to this? See you after the page break....

April 26, 2020

I usually don't do this, but I feel I need to throw everyone a bone. From here

The same goes for the three companies affiliated with Monty Bennett. Ashford Hospitality Trust, where Bennett is chairman and a large shareholder, was able to treat each individual hotel property as a separate business when filing for PPP. They applied for 117 of the loans, getting $38 million so far, the most disclosed by any company. Loans for another $38 million were still being processed.

“We plan to keep all funds received under the PPP, which were provided as a result of the application process and other specific requirements established for our industry by Congress,” the Bennett-run companies said April 25 in a statement.

April 21, 2020

5/16: US and UK updated to today. But US numbers are bizarre -- Worldometer doesn't agree with itself, in that today's total deaths minus yesterday's (as I copied them each day) gives a value quite a bit higher than the # they show in the daily deaths graph for today. If I dig deeper, I see that for at least the last few days, the #s in the "total deaths" graph don't agree with the numbers I copied into a spreadsheet every night after they cleared the by-state table for the day. I know they adjust numbers sometimes, but these are big numbers, and I don't see an explanation as yet. I'm not sure I'm going to bother continuing with this if the data is this murky.

5/14 note: I'm going to keep updating these for the time being, although even the number of deaths is reportedly being manipulated by different states in different ways, so I don't know how indicative these numbers are. The time when Worldometer cuts off each night varies, but usually the updates are ready by 10:00 p.m. eastern time, and surely by 11:00. If I get time I might see if I can put a link to this post on the front page, and if I really get time I'd like to do some other graphs as well. We'll see.

This didn't take long, although it would be quicker to make these if I had been collecting daily data in a useful format all along. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.